Introduction

A “legislative history” is a collection of documents that constitutes the pre-enactment record of Congressional action on a bill. These documents may may shed light on legislative intent for purposes of statutory interpretation, although a common argument exists that you should not look beyond a statute's "plain and ordinary meaning."

The documents that comprise a legislative history and the general order in which they are produced are:

If you are looking for an individual document and already have the citation for it, click on the appropriate tab to see the resources you can use to find it.

Research Tip: Because a committee report can be one of the most important pieces of a legislative history, you may decide to search first for any committee report(s) on a bill.

Please note, access to certain databases linked in this guide may be restricted to UT Law or the UT community; please see the library's Databases page that lays out access privileges.

Examples throughout the Guide

When using this guide, look for the Example boxes on the various sub-pages.

This guide highlights legislative history documents from the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 as samples of what you might find in the process of doing legislative history research and their citation in Bluebook style.